The Facts of Life in 'Inception', 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', and 'The Matrix'

Images of well-spoken men wearing dour expressions and designer suits have become to Christopher Nolan what terrycloth robes and light-sabers are to George Lucas or blood-spattered blades to Quentin Tarantino.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception was released last week to resounding praise, establishing the director as one of only a handful of cinematic artists whose name has become synonymous both with critical plaudits and box office hoohah. Yet the difference between Nolan and other auteurs of populist embrace is the consistent intellectualism of his vision. While the Spielbergs and Tarantinos wrench the viscera, Nolan tickles the cerebellum. His dialogue requires full attention, and he holds that attention by suspending threads of thought the way Hitchcock did emotions. Images of well-spoken men wearing dour expressions and designer suits have become to Nolan what terrycloth robes and light-sabers are to George Lucas or blood-spattered blades to Quentin Tarantino.

His ability to carve out brainy protagonists has become bankable even as applied to comic book heroes like Batman, the adventures of whom we can’t help but feel in our gut but which under Nolan’s tutelage we now consider with frontal lobes intact. Cinema is a felt medium, and most directors would play to that strength. Others, like Nolan, let the constructed thematic intricacies of their images carry equal weight as the easier-elicited, felt aspects. Nolan has earned the trust of his audience by playing to the smartest version of it, by working within a tradition of genre-bent stories that depend most upon the figuring out and thinking over.

Nolan’s most recent fantasy can be cast against two other highly successful millennial fairy tales of that particular “reality gone wacky” vein, where visual perception of what is real becomes part and parcel of characters’ story arc, the Michel Gondry-directed, Charlie Kaufman-penned Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Wachowski Brothers’ information-age adventure, The Matrix. These films are an espionage/”long con” story, a romantic comedy, and an adventure cum bildungsroman, respectively, movies marketed to different audiences, created for different effect, dressed in markedly different visual styles (can you imagine Carrie-Anne Moss’s gothed-out Trinity, Jim Carrey’s nerdified Joel Barish, and Leo DiCaprio’s Cobb showing up to the same party? Neither can I).

Yet there is a commonality between them besides the fact that people’s brains get fiddled with and stuff goes slightly sideways. Information, or lack of information, figures heavily as plot device in all three movies, and while the true pleasures of each film are mostly wrapped up in supposing how concepts of reality would be susceptible to alterations of human ability to understand them, this understanding revolves around missing bits of data and unknown facts which, once known, change everything.

Inception’s densely woven tapestry of shared dreams and co-opted subconscious minds would read like the Mapquest of a hairball were it not for its “long con” McGuffin. A team of mentalist spies cut straight from 007’s cloth are tasked with an impossible task, or so they inform us, the planting an original thought in their mark’s mind. The movie doles out heaping spoonfuls of exposition around the backdrop of mental espionage, but things really pick up once the focus moves from extracting information to implanting it. Still more vital to Inception’s burgeon of story is the DiCaprio character’s unresolved marital issues and their implications in the stability of his team’s shared dream world. Reality may be subject to the dreamer’s mind, but what that dreamer knows or does not know (apparently) determines the rules of the game.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind assigns equal importance to the knowledge of the dreamer, though for Jim Carrey’s and Kate Winslet’s characters this knowledge is a torment. They are a lovably toxic couple driven by each other to the brink of paying for the service of forgetting one other. Much of the movie traces this journey into imposed ignorance and seems, finally, to suggest that knowledge, or lack thereof, does not necessarily determine whom one loves.

The Matrix boasts two vital secrets turned plot device: The first one frames the Wachowski’s whole imagined world, mainly that life as we know it is a computer program from which only a chosen few may break free by freeing their minds, (whatever that means.) The second is a kind of trick played on the movie’s hero by an all-knowing Oracle. The film’s story arc and the possibility of a Matrix sequel depend entirely on whether or not Neo is the One, (whatever that means.) The Oracle tells him that he’s not, which of course somehow takes off the burden of “oneness,” enabling Neo to prove wrong the prophecy and fulfill his potential. A similar technique is practiced by soldiers who, facing battle, mentally count themselves as already dead, the idea being that as the pressure of survival is lifted the possibilities of bravery increase. The self-fulfilled prophecy of Neo’s becoming the One is perpetuated on false information.

The appeal of Inception, as well as the long line of fantasies stories stretching from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Matrix, is to make us believe that reality is as pliable as a bit of newsprint cast upon silly putty, stretched and bent into an elongated version: “There is no spoon,” and so forth. And yet if these three examples tell us anything, it’s the importance of conventional knowledge even in undone worlds. As reality gone sideways plays out within the interests of genre, information becomes the true lynchpin of all three story arcs. As the missing pieces of the genre puzzle emerge, and unknown facts become the driving force to Story, these movies become more ordinary against their mind-blowing backdrop, and also more effective. Good fantasy stories always provide inroads (and off-ramps) between the world in which we live and those imagined, and while cinematic reality can be bent to the whims of the CGI wizards, entertainment is always measured in terms of what works and what doesn’t.

What Christopher Nolan seems to get that a lot of other modern storytellers don’t is that a story is essentially a mental exercise in suspended disbelief. Never mind the pitfalls of discriminating between fiction and non-fiction, abstract representation into story is the suspension of “the real” or “what happens to be the case” in lieu of a “supposing.” Even stories most connected to realism require the framing device of removed perspective, the volunteerism of directing one’s attention to certain aspects of reality, certain pieces of the whole. Realism doesn’t claim to represent reality but rather couches itself within the ethos of “you were not there; you would not know without my telling,” so that the telling becomes a “supposing” of real events.

Still, while realism serves as the baseline of seeing outside of oneself into abstraction, fantasy extends this “supposing” to impossible things and not just “things that happen not to be the case.” The fantasy world runs alongside the abstract one, and the process of “supposing” inherent to the understanding of any story extends even further into genre. The fantasy exercise is extremely aesthetically rewarding, which no doubt speaks to why fairy tales are so popular; they are like that famous description of Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, “like most men [or stories] except moreso.”

Inception is a wonderfully dizzying example of the kind of story we work to understand that equally rewards our efforts in the currency of an imagined world.